Virtual worlds such as Second Life, There.com, Active Worlds, World of Warcraft, etc. facilitate synchronous communication via avatar-centric chat. Specifically, users teleoperate avatars in a virtual place, and engage in a chatroom-style conversation, where messages appear as bubbles floating above the avatars' heads like in comic strips. Certain instant messaging clients, such as Yahoo Instant Messenger with Yahoo Avatars, support similar interactions—where the chat participants are portrayed as avatars in a single room, and messages also graphically appear as chat bubbles.
A common problem in these conversation contexts is the desire to persist interesting pieces of conversation for later reference. This could be for a document being created, or for a common activity such as collecting ideas for a brainstorm. There are a variety of solutions that can be classified into the following categories:
Record Everything+Posthoc Analysis. Most of the above systems directly support, or provide add-ons, to record the entire conversation. The recording is accomplished by either logging all chat messages—or an automatically filtered set of messages—or by recording a screen movie. Afterwards someone has to manually sift through the recording to extract the “interesting” pieces, or a software application does automated analysis for “interesting” highlights, or a semi-automated process is used. As a result, this can be a labor-intensive operation depending on the complexity of the conversation.
Assign a Scribe. During the conversation, someone volunteers to be a “scribe”—the note-taker. The volunteer then multitasks—he or she may want to participate in the conversation, but also has to take notes. More importantly, this volunteer has to pay enough attention to manually identify “interesting” highlights to record. As a result, this can be a labor-intensive task for the volunteer.
Active Participation. During the conversation, anyone who wishes to persist an interesting piece of information makes a note. Then the notes are submitted on the spot, or collected afterwards. In a virtual world, users need a specialized authoring tool (e.g. a virtual shared post-it note) to do this. If such a tool is not supported, users need to do this manually with an external application (e.g. text editor).
A related problem is the desire to create virtual artifacts with textual content, based on a conversation. Such artifacts can be useful as shared media (e.g. a reference document to pass around, a virtual poster, a set of virtual post-it notes on a whiteboard, etc). A common approach involves the user creating the desired artifact with whatever tools are available, and then copy/pasting textual content into the artifact.